Even such is time that takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust:

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandred all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days

And from which earth and grave and dust

The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

On this day in 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded.

Despite his reputation as a statesman and explorer and his status as a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, Raleigh’s life was fraught with legal trouble and imprisonment. His first stay in the Tower of London came about in 1592, when Queen Elizabeth discovered the captain of her guard had secretly married her lady-in-waiting Elizabeth “Bess” Throckmorton. Though he would eventually be released, Raleigh spent the rest of his life in and out of prison as his favor swung up and down with subsequent monarchs. When he was finally sentenced to beheading, Raleigh wrote these words on the snuff of a candle the night before he died:

Cowards fear to die, but Courage stout

Rather than live in snuff, will be put out.

The sun may set and rise:

But we contrariwise

Sleep after our short light

One everlasting night.

(After the Latin of Catullus)

“Let us dispatch,” Raleigh told his executioner when the time came. “At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear.”

Raleigh is often credited with popularizing smoking in England. After his execution, his jailers found in his cell a small tobacco pouch engraved with Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore: “It was my companion at that most miserable time.”

After his first stay in the Tower, Raleigh began a brief beef with Christopher Marlowe, penning “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” in response to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” 350 years later, William Carlos Williams wrote “Raleigh Was Right”:

We cannot go to the country
for the country will bring us
no peace
What can the small violets
tell us that grow on furry stems
in the long grass among
lance-shaped leaves?

Though you praise us
and call to mind the poets
who sung of our loveliness it was
long ago!
long ago!
when country people
would plow and sow with
flowering minds and pockets
at ease — if ever this were true.

Not now. Love itself a flower
with roots in a parched ground.
Empty pockets
make empty heads. Cure it
if you can but do not believe
that we can live today
in the country
for the country will bring us
no peace.